Where does Tim Tawa fit into the roster picture after his first month in the big leagues?
Introduction
There’s always a certain amount of excitement and hype around a prospect’s MLB debut. It’s an undeniably exciting moment for the player and it’s often accompanied by genuinely heartfelt videos from the team’s public relations department of the player receiving the news along with in-game interviews of their family. I’ll admit that I’m a complete sucker for these kinds of videos and news pieces even if I’ve seen ones like it a dozen or more times. I think it speaks to a level of sentimentality I have for all the usual values that baseball espouses: belief in oneself, continuous improvement, and perseverance in the face of failure. All of those emotions are magnified for players who have long ago lost the ‘prospect’ title or were never highly touted by evaluators and are simply waiting for a big league club to give them an opportunity.
Tim Tawa certainly seems to fit the mold of the latter as the 11th-round pick out of Stanford finally cracked the team’s top-30 prospect list this year and didn’t necessarily wow any evaluators coming out of college. Thankfully, none of that lack of pedigree stopped Tawa from reaching the majors this year when Ketel Marte was injured and making it through the first cut when Marte made his return from the IL. But like many other players replacing an injured teammate, his hold on a roster spot is far from assured – doubly so because of his lack of experience at the big league level. So how does he currently fit into the roster and how will he stick around moving forward?
Thankfully, Tawa hit the ground running after his call up to the Show on April 5th as he collected his first big league hit, RBI, and walk in the same game against the Nationals. That began a nice streak for the Oregon native that peaked on the 24th when he collected his fourth homer and worked a walk that lifted his OPS all the way to 1.017 at the end of play that night. Unfortunately, as is to be expected for a rookie in his first taste of the major leagues, opposing pitchers adjusted to his respective style of play and he’s watched his slash line fall from .250/.378/.639 at the end of that game on the 24th to .197/.295/.455 entering play today. Even worse, with Marte back in the fold – albeit struggling to find his timing – Tawa’s playing time has been curtailed that much more as he’s had just two starts since Marte’s return.
So where does Tawa need to improve to stay up with the big league team? Well, he’s mostly proven himself against big league fastballs with a .212 BA and a .485 SLG on those pitches so far. In fact, one could argue that he’s been somewhat unlucky against them with a significant divergence between his expected and actual stats for both categories as he holds a .286 and .532 expected respectively. That’s particularly encouraging as pitchers will first test rookies with fastballs to see if they can handle the kind of velocity and movement you are likely to see at this level. If he demonstrates that he can handle that, then pitchers will move onto offspeed and breaking balls and thankfully the young righty has similarly proven himself against the former with a .286 BA and .429 SLG. But the picture dramatically changes when it comes to breaking balls where he’s managed just a .154 BA to this point. Until he can figure out how to either lay off those pitches or turn them around, pitchers will give him a steady diet of them.
Some of this slump may just be that – a slump. Tawa is neither the first nor the last player to have a period where he’s not at his best. He only has to look to Pavin Smith who finally broke an 0-for-15 slide with his solo homer tonight. That’s one of my favorite parts about baseball – there’s a constant tug of war between batters and pitchers with each adjusting to the other depending on results. This is Tawa’s first of hopefully many periods of adjustments. How he handles it will go a long way to determining how successful he will be as a big leaguer.